Meet the experts presenting at RAIIDIUS 2026.
Showing 17 of 17 speakers
Professor
Harvard Medical School
Dr. Walensky has served as the 19th Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2021–2023); Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (2012–2021 and 2025-present); and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital (2017–2021). Dr. Walensky is an infectious disease clinician whose research career is guided by a belief that the clinical and economic outcomes of medical decisions can be improved through the explicit articulation of choices, systematic assembly of evidence, and careful assessment of comparative costs and benefits. Her groundbreaking work and over 300 research publications have motivated changes to US HIV testing and immigration policy; promoted expanded funding for HIV-related research, treatment, and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); and led to policy revisions toward aggressive HIV screening—especially for the underserved—and earlier treatment in resource-limited international settings. Dr. Walensky has been an active member of policy discussions at the WHO, Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, US DHSS HIV Guidelines Committee, and NIH Office of AIDS Research.
CEO & President
Phare Bio
Dr. Kosaraju is the CEO and President of Phare Bio, a social venture pioneering the use of generative AI and deep learning to discover new classes of antibiotics, in collaboration with the Collins Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Under her leadership, Phare Bio launched with funding and support from TED’s Audacious Project, received $27 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), was selected for Google.org’s Generative AI Accelerator, and has been recognized by Fast Company, Newsweek and Wired Health. Dr. Kosaraju has spent her career building companies and driving innovation at the intersection of infectious disease and computational biology. She was the founding CEO of Variant Bio, a venture-backed genomics and therapeutics company, and previously served as an executive at SIGA Technologies, where she helped bring antiviral drugs against emerging threats to market. Earlier in her career, Dr. Kosaraju was a White House appointee at the Pentagon, where she served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. She is a recipient of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-founder of the Alliance to End Biological Threats, and a Lecturer at Stanford’s Centre for Biosecurity and Pandemic Resilience. She earned her M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and her B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University.
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
CUIMC Division of Infectious Diseases
Dr. Reyes Nieva is a biomedical informatician specializing in AI in medicine and public health. His research aims to advance precision health for all by harnessing AI and informatics to accelerate scientific knowledge discovery and translation at scale, strengthen next-generation learning health systems, and interrogate the ethical, legal, and social considerations necessary for the development of human-centered AI. Dr. Reyes Nieva's research draws on prior experience in health systems strengthening and humanitarian efforts including roles in strategic information for the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program at Harvard and a three-year term as a Commissioner of Human Rights. Dr. Reyes Nieva received his PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University, while concurrently a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Medical School. He also holds a Master of Applied Science in Spatial Analysis from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA in History and Sociology from Yale University. Recently he was named a STAT Wunderkind, which highlights 30 of the top early-career researchers in North America.
Assistant Professor of Medical Sciences (in Medicine and in Epidemiology)
Dr. Castor is an Assistant Professor in the CUIMC Division of Infectious Diseases. She is an epidemiologist who studies how to deliver public health innovations at scale by examining the unique and joint effects of biomedical, behavioral, and structural factors that affect infectious diseases in priority populations in low- and middle-income countries and in marginalized populations in the US. Prior, she led implementation research activities within the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as Senior Epidemiologist/Acting Chief of the Implementation Science branch of the USAID Office of HIV/AIDS and Senior Epidemiologist in the Department of State Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator. Dr. Castor worked within PEPFAR-supported programs to design, implement, and evaluate comprehensive HIV interventions and introduce and scale-up novel prevention technologies. Her HIV research involves intersecting areas of interest such as women’s and reproductive health, health disparities, mental health, nutrition, cervical cancer and other emerging infections.
Assistant Professor of Medicine at CUIMC
Dr. Zucker is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Columbia University Medical Center and Assistant Medical Director of the New York City STD Prevention Training Center. Dr. Zucker trained as a combined adult and pediatric infectious diseases physician and is an experienced HIV, HIV prevention, and sexual health care provider providing status-neutral care to patients of all ages in the NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia Comprehensive Health Program Sexual Health Clinic. His research focuses on the intersection of data science, behavioral science, and implementation science, focusing on developing and testing ways to optimize engagement in the sexual health cascade of care for individuals both living with or at risk of sexually transmitted infections.
Harold C. Neu Professor of Infectious Diseases and Chief of Infectious Diseases at CUIMC
Dr. Sobieszczyk is the Harold Neu Professor of Infectious Diseases (in Medicine) at the Columbia University Medical Center. She is the Chief of Infectious Diseases at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. Dr. Sobieszczyk is a clinical virologist and the principal investigator of the NIH-funded Columbia Collaborative Clinical Trials Unit which has been advancing the science of HIV and emerging infections like SARS-CoV-2.
Dr. Heck is a postdoctoral research scientist in Columbia University’s Division of Infectious Diseases. He is an epidemiologist with a decade of experience researching HIV prevention strategies for key and vulnerable populations in eastern and southern Africa. His research primarily seeks to improve the availability, access, use, and continuation of HIV prevention services, methods, and interventions using social, behavioral, and implementation science approaches. Recently, he has been examining the dynamics of risk perception and its influence on risk-reduction behaviors. Dr. Heck is also interested in identifying and addressing social, structural, and systemic drivers of health disparities. Dr. Heck holds a PhD in epidemiology and an MPH in population and family health, both from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor
CUIMC Department of Biomedical Informatics
Dr. Hripcsak is Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. He is a board-certified internist with degrees in chemistry, medicine, and biostatistics. Dr. Hripcsak’s current research focus is on the clinical information stored in electronic health records and on the development of next-generation health record systems. Using nonlinear time series analysis, machine learning, knowledge engineering, and natural language processing, he is developing the methods necessary to support clinical research and patient safety initiatives. He serves as a PI on Columbia’s eMERGE grant, as a PI on Columbia’s regional recruitment center for the All of Us precision medicine program, and as site PI for Columbia’s role on the All of Us Data and Research Center. Dr. Hripcsak is a fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published over 350 papers.
Associate Director
Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine
Dr. Ostropolets is an Associate Director at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. She works on methods to advance observational research for medical products safety. She is a long-standing OHDSI collaborator, she designs, builds and disseminates frameworks, approaches and tools for minimizing bias in observational research with a specific focus on patient phenotyping. Since 2022, she has led the OHDSI Vocabulary improvement initiative focused on improving the quality, fit-for-use, and transparency of the OHDSI Standardized Vocabularies. Dr. Ostropolets received her medical degree and completed her residency at Kharkiv National Medical University. Before joining Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, she was Director, Head of Innovation Lab for Odysseus Data Services coordinating business intelligence initiative for harmonization and visualization of real-world data.
Berman Institute-Oxford Joint Postdoctoral Fellow
Berman Institute, Johns Hopkins University | Ethox Center, Oxford University
Dr. Abdool Karim is a public health lawyer, whose research has focused on improving health through the law. She is a Berman Institute-Oxford Joint Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Infectious Disease Ethics under the Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE), a collaboration between the Berman Institute and the Ethox Center, Oxford University. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. Dr. Abdool Karim completed her PhD in Law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal following an LLM in Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a clerkship at the Constitutional Court in South Africa. As a practicing lawyer and legal researcher, her policy impact ranges from her role in advising the South African National Department of Health on food labelling to her contributions in addressing COVID-19 vaccine inequity in Africa. Her current research interests span equitable access to novel health technologies, rights-based approaches to public health, ethics and obesity, and the use of solidarity in developing a right to public health.
Associate Professor
New York University
Dr. Bershteyn is an Associate Professor of Population Health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Her lab uses simulation science to inform public health decision-making at the intersection of infectious diseases and related health conditions. Her research focuses on infectious disease transmission dynamics and on evaluating the effects of biomedical and programmatic advances in HIV prevention and care. She collaborates with local public health agencies, health authorities across eastern and southern Africa, and international organizations including the World Health Organization. Dr. Bershteyn earned her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied lipid self-assembly at nanoparticle surfaces as a biomimetic approach to vaccine development. She later founded and led the HIV/Tuberculosis modeling team at the Institute for Disease Modeling, now part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Vice President, Data, Technology, and Innovation in Global Development
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
Dr. Cantor is Vice President, Data, Technology, and Innovation in Global Development at Regeneron. His current role focuses on clinical data optimization and using AI and other innovative analytics approaches to design and run clinical trials more effectively. Prior to this role, he led clinical informatics at the Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC), where his work focused on developing and optimizing phenotypes from EHR and cohort data and linking them with genetic data to help discover new drug targets. His group’s phenotyping work at the RGC was crucial to several high-profile discoveries including the roles of INHBE and CIDEB in metabolic disease and the initial results of exome sequencing of 450,000 UK Biobank participants. Prior to Regeneron, he was Director of Clinical Research Informatics at New York University School of Medicine where he led informatics for the CTSI. Dr. Cantor is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine and currently sees patients weekly at Bellevue’s medicine clinic.
Dr. Chunara is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University. The overarching goal of her research is to develop computational and statistical approaches for acquiring, integrating and using data to improve population-level public health. She focuses on the design and development of data mining and machine learning methods to address challenges related to data and goals of public health, as well as fairness and ethics in the design and use of data and algorithms embedded in social systems. At NYU, Dr. Chunara also leads the Chunara Lab, which develops computational and statistical methods across data mining, natural language processing, spatio-temporal analyses and machine learning, to study population health. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor at HealthMap and the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard Medical School. She completed her PhD at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and BSc at Caltech.
CUIMC Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics
Dr. Kontos is a Professor of Radiology and Vice Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Research in the CUIMC Department of Radiology and Director of Biomarker Imaging at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, with additional appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering. She is also the founding director of Columbia's Center for Innovation in Imaging Biomarkers and Integrated Diagnostics (CIMBID), a multidisciplinary center dedicated to developing and integrating quantitative imaging and non-imaging biomarkers for personalized disease prediction. As a computer scientist with expertise in AI, machine learning, and big data analytics for multimodal data, Dr. Kontos’ research program focuses on investigating the role of imaging as a quantitative biomarker for improving cancer screening, prognostication, and treatment. She has developed innovative computational methodologies that have enabled the investigation of novel phenotypic biomarkers via imaging and has translated these biomarkers through extensive clinical and epidemiologic studies to answer important research questions for personalizing care. Dr. Kontos studied engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Patras. She received her PhD in computer and information sciences from Temple University, followed by postdoc training in radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has certificates in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania; Cancer Biology and Targeted Therapeutics from Harvard University; and AI for Decision Making from the Wharton School of Business.
Harvard Medical School | Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center
Douglas Krakower is Faculty in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Research Scientist at The Fenway Institute, and Associate Professor in Medicine and Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on ways to optimize HIV prevention in healthcare settings with a focus on implementing HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). At the Department of Population Medicine, Dr. Krakower and colleagues are using predictive analytics to identify candidates for PrEP using electronic health records data. This work represents a collaborative effort with researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Fenway Institute, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. His clinical practice encompasses general infectious diseases and HIV treatment and prevention.
Executive Director - STI Program, Bureau of Hepatitis, HIV, and Sexually Transmitted Infections
NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Dr. Pathela is the Executive Director of the STI Program in the Bureau of Hepatitis, HIV, and STI at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH). She has overall responsibility for directing, evaluating, and coordinating the activities of the Program, which consists of roughly 90 staff who conduct work in STI program implementation, surveillance and field operations, and epidemiology, research and evaluation. She serves on the American STD Association’s Board of Directors and as an Associate Editor of the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
Assistant Professor
CUIMC Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics
Dr. Walker is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in Science and Technology Studies (STS), political anthropology, organizational studies, and bioethics. Her research investigates the social dynamics of financial and private sector organizations in health and medicine. She is the Principal Investigator on a four-year project examining perspectives from members of the commercial genomics industry on the social and ethical dynamics of their field. This work is funded by an Early Career Investigator award (K99/R00) from the National Human Genome Research Institute. Dr. Walker’s previous research has examined the organizational dynamics of international financial institutions making loans for global health projects, the ethics of “precision rationing,” and the politics of patenting biotechnology. Her work employs qualitative methods, including ethnography, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. Her most recent work includes additional survey methods and town hall-style focus groups. Prior to coming to Columbia, Dr. Walker was a postdoctoral fellow at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Walker received her doctorate from Cornell University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies, a master’s degree in political sociology and STS from University of Strasbourg (France), and an undergraduate degree in Biology from Brown University.